Bramble

The bramble is a delicious and refreshing gin-based drink based on simplicity. Gin - soured with lemon, sweetened with syrup, and flavoured with créme de mûre. The result is a beautifully balanced drink featuring dark blackberry. While known as a springtime cocktail, the refreshing lemon and crushed ice also lend it well to summer sipping.

this recipe

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• Origin
• Ingredients
• Instructions
• Substitutions
• Equipment
• 📖 Recipe

Origin

Dick Bradsell, known as a patriarch of England's cocktail uptick, and then manager of Fred's Club, created this cocktail in 1984. This members club in London's Soho catered to a very famous clientele, including Boy George, Naomi Cambell, and The Banshees, to name just a few.

He was inspired to make the bramble after sampling some crème de mûre. The flavour carried him back to a childhood memory from the Isle of Wight, fighting his way through a prickly blackberry bush to get at the juicy berries that others had missed. The blackberry bush is otherwise called a bramble.

Fred's Club shared its kitchen with a restaurant that had a crushed ice machine; it would use crushed ice to display its seafood and oysters. And so, Dick incorporated crushed ice from this machine into the drink. The crushed ice works perfectly to dilute a drink that would otherwise be too cloying.

If you're interested in another British cocktail you should try the east 8 hold up, which has a rather hilarious backstory.

Ingredients

• Gin
• Freshly squeezed lemon juice
• Simple syrup
• Blackberry liqueur - I use Giffard Crème de Mûre
• Crushed ice

See the recipe card below for quantities.

Instructions

Add gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup into a cocktail shaker with a few ice cubes. Shake vigorously for about twenty seconds. Strain into a rocks glass filled with crushed ice.

Adding the liquid will cause some of the ice to melt. Top up the glass with more crushed ice to have it slightly 'heaping.'

Then, drizzle the blackberry liqueur on top of the crushed ice. The dark liqueur will filter through the ice, creating a beautiful bleeding effect into the cocktail.

Substitutions

Crème de mûre is the ultimate choice of liqueur to use in this cocktail. However, when necessary, you should substitute it with crème de cassis, which is made from black currants. You could also use the raspberry-based Chambord, however, the resulting flavour will be quite different. Chambord will give you a sweeter, red berry flavour and I would slightly reduce the simple syrup to counter that.

If you substitute the gin with vodka in this cocktail, the cocktail flavour will have been changed dramatically and can no longer be considered a bramble. According to Dick, the creator, this should at the very least be referred to as a vodka bramble to differentiate it.

Equipment

To make this cocktail, you will need a cocktail shaker and strainer.

cocktail bar set

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You will need a rocks glass for serving.

double rocks glass

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And you will need crushed ice. I used this shaved ice machine to easily make the perfect texture of ice for this cocktail.

Shaved ice machine

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📖 Recipe